It has been often commented upon recently that Supreme Court justices who don’t have a firm commitment to originalism tend to slide leftward in their time on the Court.
There have been those who have challenged whether this is really so, but in the case of one justice, it seems undeniable.
Harry S. Blackmun, the author of the majority decision in the infamous case Roe v. Wade, which doomed millions of children to be murdered.
An interesting thing about this article, for me, was its unintentional comparison to Citizen Kane. I have long regarded Citizen Kane as the classic cinematic portrait of the doomed soul who is so desperate for human love that he will do absolutely anything–no matter how immoral–to obtain it.
In the author’s words:
Roe vs. Wade is the "law of the land" or, as scholar Mark Levin says, the methodical seduction of a chronically insecure man [Harry S. Blackmun] by flattery, of a man who desperately wanted to be loved by all those who adore the New York Times.
In Blackmun’s case, he was terminally afraid of being lost in the shadow of his patron, Chief Justice Warren Burger, who got him his position on the Supreme Court.
Blackmun began voting more and more liberal in order to distinguish himself from Warren, lest they be referred to any longer as "the Minnesota twins" (based on the fact that they were from that state, which was home to a sports team of that name).
He felt compelled to prove himself, to prove that he was his own man, and to receive the adulation of others in his own right.
In the end, Blackmun didn’t even attend Warrent’s funeral.
How black is that?
There seems to be a striking parallel between constitutional interpretation and Scriptural interpretation. The less originalist you are the more liberal you become.
And pride condemned the innocent to death…
Nice, Len.
Hmm. Voting for RvW for THAT? That’s very perplexing. Well, no, it isn’t. It’s tragically human.
What a grevious mistake he made. It is sad how many will pay for his pride.
I remember researching at one point the estimated number of abortions world wide per year because I wanted to compare it to the estimated number of people who die due to starvation per year. This was prompted by the recent concerts and ‘Make Poverty History’ campaigns that have been going on (not to say that these efforts are not noble.)
Something like 11million people a year die of starvation in the world.
Though there isn’t very good data on how many abortions are committed per year in the world, 46 million seemed to be about the number (numbers are definitely skewed due to unknown usage of ‘The After Morning Pill’ and definitely not including abortions caused by IUD’s and whatnot.)
Let’s not forget, however, that Burger voted with the majority on Roe v. Wade too.